The present invention broadly relates to pocket doors and, more particularly relates to a pocket sliding door that includes a groove in the bottom edge adapted to engage a tongue extending from a track constructed into a floor hidden within a wall, or pocket to stably maintain the door on the track during intended operation.
Pocket doors are known in the conventional arts. Pocket doors are doors that slide into and out of a hollow cavity, or pocket, in a doorway wall. To open a doorway, egress through which is maintained by a pocket door system, the closed pocket door is slid into and disappears inside the space or pocket in the wall. To close, or prevent egress through a pocket doorway opening, the pocket door is slid from its hidden (open-door) position within the pocket. Pockets doors were popular in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as space savers in Victorian style homes, but appear to have fallen out of regular use in most of the twentieth century.
Conventional pocket doors typically ride on a fixed ceiling track mounted at the top of an opening into a room or closet, egress to which the pocket door is meant to maintain. The fixed ceiling track extends contiguously into the pocket. The pocket door includes a mechanism that engages with and cooperates with the fixed ceiling track, allowing the pocket door to slide in and out of the opening thereupon. One of the desirable features of conventional pocket door systems is that they avoid having a track or sliding mechanism at the floor, such as is required with conventional patio doors. Floor tracks are aesthetically undesirable in an interior setting, for example, at the doorway or egress into a dining room, library, etc. More importantly, however, floor tracks that are readily mounted upon a floor are likely to cause tripping and injury resulting therefore, particularly with children and older people.
Prior art FIGS. 1 and 2 together depict a conventional pocket door system (1), and its limitations. Conventional pocket door system (2) includes a pocket door (4) adapted for sliding into and out of an enclosed wall or pocket (6) to enable or prevent egress through a framed door opening. The framed door opening comprises top frame (8) and pocket side boundary (10). The pocket door (4) includes a roller mechanism (12) mounted at a top door surface (3), which is received into and cooperates with an upper track (18) to allow the door to slide into and out of the pocket. A door knob or handle (16) is used to open and close the pocket door, i.e., enabling it to slide open and closed.
As can be seen in FIGS. 1 and 2, conventional pocket door system (2) includes no bottom track on floor 14 for guiding the door into and out of the pocket. This lack of control at the pocket door bottom leads to problems. That is, a known shortcoming of conventional pocket doors derives from the fact that they only engage the fixed ceiling track with some type of engaging roller mechanism that facilitates sliding. The fixed ceiling track must absorb any forces exerted by the weight of the door and by the opening and closing forces exerted by a hand of a user or by an electromechanical driving means adapted to automatically slide the door between open and closed positions. As a consequence, the roller mechanisms and fixed ceiling tracks of conventional pocket doors are known to squeak, creak, grind, and/or fall off of the track.
The most significant problem by far with conventional pocket doors, however, is their tendency to be unstable at the bottom due to the lack of a floor track. This instability causes to the pocket door being frequently jammed or dislodged from its fixed ceiling track. And while dislodging and jamming is a problem where a pocket door is closed, i.e., extending out of the pocket and at least partly accessible, the problem becomes more acute where the pocket door is dislodged or jammed in the pocket or wall, and not readily accessible. Additionally, where bottom rollers are utilized, the rollers have complicated moving parts which may be subject to breakage and difficult to replace.